My pointless quest to achieve perfect retro console fidelity

Without getting too deep into the AV nerd wormhole -- and I am certainly no expert on this matter -- the short of it is that that old video game consoles were designed in very small resolutions specifically for old CRT televisions. You remember those old bulky beasts that took two grown men to lift? They had actual cathode ray guns inside of them that drew the image on the screen with a spray of electrons. Old consoles (we're talking pre-PlayStation 2) were designed to make use of this specific process: They relied on CRT-specific features like scanlines (this usually refers to the horizontal black lines that noticeably ran through the image), color bleed between the lines, and interlacing. So when you plug one of these systems into a modern HDTV, the signal has to be treated and interpreted for your big shiny flat panel.